Question

What was cotton's chief competitor as a Southern cash crop?

Answer 1

In the Antebellum South tobacco was cotton's chief competitor as a cash crop.

Explanation:

Prior to the invention of the cotton gin (by Eli Whitney) harvesting cotton was a labor intensive process. Despite the fact that many Southern farmers during this time owned slaves (providing free labor), it took a long time to harvest cotton and convert it into a market-ready product. This was due to the numerous seeds in the cotton boll (the white part of the cotton plant). These seeds had to be removed by hand before sending the cotton to market, if one was not careful when removing the seeds they may wind up breaking the cotton fibers and ruining the product which would make it un-sellable. The cotton gin made separating the seeds from the cotton fibers far less arduous, expediting the cotton harvesting process, making cotton more profitable (since the cotton can be harvested and processed faster it allows farmers to produce and sell more cotton).

Courtesy of: The United States Department of Agriculture; Obtained from:
Public Domain

The photograph above shows a cotton plant, each one of those little puffy white things is called a "cotton boll", within each boll there are numerous hard back seeds that need to be removed before the cotton can be sold.

Tobacco, unlike cotton was easy to produce. Tobacco was rarely processed (tobacco is typically dried before being used) at the farms on which it was grown and harvested. This made it easy for tobacco farmers to grow, harvest, and sell tobacco leaves. The time it took to get tobacco to market was much less than that of cotton prior to the invention of the cotton gin, thus making tobacco more profitable than cotton.

With the invention of the cotton gin cotton production times dropped (people spent less time cleaning the cotton) which increased profits for cotton farmers (by allowing them to produce more cotton). This increase in profit was so great in fact that it rivaled the profits of tobacco farmers, both cotton and tobacco vied for the title of major cash crop in the Antebellum south.